Right about what? That their precious libraries don't have enough syntactic support in the current Scala toolchain? I mean sure I guess they're right in that sense.
My argument is not just about the personalities involved but I admit that is a large part of why this leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I think these libraries are a really nice way to bone up on theory and see how certain abstract concepts get expressed in something that is computable. None of that is the issue. The issue is that there is now going to be an unnecessary choice involved in what toolchain you are going to use even though the choice is going to be completely irrelevant. The enterprise guys are not going to use anything that is not backed by service/stability guarantees and the group that is going to use the alternate toolchain is potentially going to diverge more and more from the stable branch. It just feels like a whole bunch of wasted effort. There are many examples of this happening already. The biggest example being D and the fork of the standard library in the early days. The other examples are python2 vs python3 and perl5 vs perl6. Going by historical examples this is going to be a complete and utter failure.
Don't focus too much on the relevance of the Typelevel fork to the Typelevel libraries. The people involved (myself excepted) work on the Typelevel libraries, and consequently have particular interest in the features they benefit most from. But the fork, and the infrastructure around it, is for the benefit of the entire community, not just Typelevel. We'll happily entertain PRs for any useful language feature, provided it meets the compatibility requirements.
My argument is not just about the personalities involved but I admit that is a large part of why this leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I think these libraries are a really nice way to bone up on theory and see how certain abstract concepts get expressed in something that is computable. None of that is the issue. The issue is that there is now going to be an unnecessary choice involved in what toolchain you are going to use even though the choice is going to be completely irrelevant. The enterprise guys are not going to use anything that is not backed by service/stability guarantees and the group that is going to use the alternate toolchain is potentially going to diverge more and more from the stable branch. It just feels like a whole bunch of wasted effort. There are many examples of this happening already. The biggest example being D and the fork of the standard library in the early days. The other examples are python2 vs python3 and perl5 vs perl6. Going by historical examples this is going to be a complete and utter failure.